Statement of Teaching Philosophy
The classroom is a place where students should encounter new perspectives and have their beliefs challenged. As a teacher I am committed to creating an inclusive environment where students feel comfortable pushing themselves to think critically about societal conventions and social movements. Students should leave my classroom not only with a deeper understanding of the narrative strategies used by others, but empowered to more effectively express themselves and their opinions in our interconnected and global world.
Thanks to my interdisciplinary graduate training, I am prepared to teach a wide range of language, literature, and culture courses. I would be particularly excited to teach courses related to my research interests and expertise including courses on women's literature and film in German, representations of violence in film and literature, 19th and 20th century philosophy, the adaptation of mythological and fairy tale stories, and sports/sports culture.
It is important to me that my classroom is a place where students feel comfortable being who they are while experiencing and engaging with a diverse set of viewpoints. By creating a space for open dialogue I hope to encourage students to reflect on how learning a foreign language or thinking about literature and culture is changing their perspective on the world and on themselves. I know from personal experience that this kind of introspection has value far beyond the classroom and I ultimately hope to share my passion for critical and reflective thinking with my students.
Thanks to my interdisciplinary graduate training, I am prepared to teach a wide range of language, literature, and culture courses. I would be particularly excited to teach courses related to my research interests and expertise including courses on women's literature and film in German, representations of violence in film and literature, 19th and 20th century philosophy, the adaptation of mythological and fairy tale stories, and sports/sports culture.
It is important to me that my classroom is a place where students feel comfortable being who they are while experiencing and engaging with a diverse set of viewpoints. By creating a space for open dialogue I hope to encourage students to reflect on how learning a foreign language or thinking about literature and culture is changing their perspective on the world and on themselves. I know from personal experience that this kind of introspection has value far beyond the classroom and I ultimately hope to share my passion for critical and reflective thinking with my students.
Foreign Language TeachingI believe that the ultimate goal in foreign language teaching should be to give students the vocabulary, structures, and cultural knowledge they need to communicate effectively in the target language. Therefore, in my classroom I use a communicative and content-based approach to encourage my students to develop context-specific language skills. In today’s digital world this also means bringing a diverse set of texts into the classroom in an effort to replicate the different media and varieties of texts that students might encounter in German-speaking countries. Whether through video chat conversations with colleagues in Germany or German class Twitter accounts, I train my students in the written, oral, and digital communication skills that they are most likely to use in their lives and future careers.
Because a foreign language class attracts students from all majors, I also find it important to cater to the unique learning styles and interests of my students. When introducing new texts into the classroom I integrate them into the lesson in as many forms as possible. For example, I designed an exercise for Heinrich Heine’s “Die Lorelei” in which I showed the students visual representations of the titular figure, had them read the poem aloud, and had them listen to the poem being spoken and sung. By having students respond to this text through a variety of different media, I alleviated some of their initial anxieties about reading a poem in a foreign language and allowed them to build up an interpretation of the poem by way of their own strengths and interests, including their prior knowledge of music or visual art. Professional DevelopmentIt has been clear to me from the start that pedagogy is a craft that always needs to be explored and honed. After my first year as an instructor at Duke I was awarded the Helga Bessent Teaching Award for my excellence and commitment to teaching.
Since then I have participated in a pedagogy reading group that brings instructors from German and Romance Languages together to discuss new trends in language pedagogy. Based on our discussions I have increased my efforts to make my classroom more learner-centered. For example, in a unit on immigration in an intermediate German class students searched for articles in German related to the current refugee situation in Europe. Then, they worked in groups to develop strategies for comprehending the difficult texts and shared the information that they learned with the class. Furthermore, during the 2015-2016 academic year I was selected to be a Preparing Future Faculty Fellow. This program brought me to different colleges and universities throughout North Carolina and introduced me to the variety of positions available in college teaching. As a fellow I gained a more complete understanding of the importance of making one’s teaching part of an entire campus experience for students. Whether at a large public university or a small private college one’s teaching should connect with the full breadth of a student’s academic experience and thereby, increase the profile of one’s home department within the larger campus community. |
Teaching Literature and PhilosophyEmpowering students to think critically about their own culture is another important part of how I see my role as a teacher. For example, when leading the discussion sections for a course on nineteenth-century philosophy and literature I chose to focus on encouraging students to think carefully about the role and perspective of the narrative voice in each of the texts that we read. By thinking critically about the positionality of all authors, even those writing philosophical texts, students were also forced to examine their own positionality in relationship to these texts. For example, we did a close reading of a few passages from Nietzsche in order to generate a picture of the persona under which he was writing, the subject generated by his narrative voice. Engaging with these questions helped the students to link the philosophical and literary texts more effectively in their writing and helped them to relate to the course theme, reality and its discontents, in more complex ways.
Diversity in the ClassroomTeaching at both a public and a private university, I have had the opportunity to teach a diverse group of students from a variety of socio-economic, racial/ethnic, and national backgrounds. In addition, my courses have attracted students from different majors and with different academic interests. These experiences taught me the importance of accounting for the unique learning styles and interests of my students.
This attunement to the diverse backgrounds of my students extends to every facet of my classroom. In the language classroom this has involved encouraging my students to think critically about grammatical gender and ensuring that they find and use pronouns in German that make them comfortable. For literature/ philosophy courses this often means requiring that students explain any technical vocabulary that they use in the classroom and designing projects that speak to a variety of interests and skills. This can be as simple as giving students the option to write about not just the historical, but also the scientific context of the texts that we are reading or viewing. I make a concerted effort to engage students on a variety of levels in the classroom, including a mix of individual and group work, so that all students are challenged, but also able to contribute to class through their strengths. Future PlansIn 2015 I shared some of my future pedagogical plans when I presented on a syllabus-in-progress on transatlantic feminism at the Women in German (WIG) conference. The course that I presented at the WIG conference is representative of my overall efforts to help students improve their critical thinking skills and intercultural competency. Entitled, “Sisterhood is Transatlantic: Feminism in the United States and Germany” it takes a comparative look at the literature, film, and theory of late twentieth-century feminist movements in the United States and Germany. Due to the transatlantic scope of the course, students would have the opportunity to think internationally about past and contemporary political topics. Fostering this kind of international dialogue is at the heart of all aspects of this course including the planning. I have been collaborating with a colleague in American Studies at the University of Bamberg in Germany on this project, which could be taught simultaneously in Germany and the US, using digital technology to bring students together in discussion.
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